‘Oh my God, Fee,’ he murmurs in my ear, the sound so low that I’m not sure if I’ve heard it or felt it. ‘You look amazing. I’ve missed you.’
I have to bite down on my lip to stop tears prickling at my eyes. He’s missed me? At first, I missed him like half of my body had been ripped away. When I moved away, I didn’t know what to do with myself without him. I looked at his number in my phone so many times and wondered what it would be like if I pressed dial. But I never did. I couldn’t after the kiss.
I croak out something that hopefully bears a resemblance to ‘Missed you too.’
It must have been intelligible because his arms tighten around me, squeezing me as tightly as you’d imagine such muscular arms could squeeze and rocking us from one foot to the other, just like he used to.
I lose track of time as we stand there, still lost in the weirdness of this situation, of the chance encounter in exactly the same spot I last saw him. I can’t compute that he still lives here or that when I laughed at the idea of protestors chained to trees, it was him all along. And I’m still half-certain that this is all a hallucination brought on by heatstroke or overexposure to the tang of prunes that Morys is now funnelling into his mouth.
Ryan’s arms get impossibly tighter. ‘My Fee,’ he murmurs, making my legs feel decidedly weak. ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it … And I appear to have accidentally turned into Victor Meldrew.’
It makes me laugh out loud and disentangle myself from him so I can take a step back on knocking knees. I blink up at him as he holds a hand up to shield his face from the sun, grey-blue eyes smarting in the light, a wide nose, and dark stubble covering his jaw. Pale lips that are so full you’d think he’d had something done to them, but they’ve always been naturally like that, the kind of lips that are impossible to look away from, and even though I’d never repeat it, that familiar urge to kiss him tingles again, apparently not deterred by the fact he’s undoubtedly married by now.
‘Of all the protests in all the world, you walk into mine.’ His voice sounds as shaky as I feel, and it buoys my confidence that maybe he is a little bit nervous too.
‘Yours?’
‘Well, ours. I’m just helping these folks out. Can you imagine what kind of heartless, soulless company would want to put a hotel here?’
I gulp, and suddenly remember we’re not alone and take a further step backwards to put a bit of space between me and Ryan.
‘It’s our only outside space,’ Tonya says. ‘We know it’s a tad overgrown, but we still come out here to sit on the benches, and some of us do the flowerbeds …’ She gestures to the knee-height red bricks that form the walls of square flowerbeds, although they’re at least seventy-five per cent weeds now. ‘A lot of us chose this place solely for the view.’
It’s a huge area, big enough for the most luxurious of hotels, but there’s nowhere you could put a building without completely cutting off Seaview Heights. The land is overgrown, and it gets worse further away from the care home. Up here, it’s trampled and worn down around the row of rickety old benches on either side of the entrance, but the rest of the ground is lost to brambles and gorse bushes creeping in from the surrounding fields. Some of them have reached such heights that I have to look up at them, and there are a variety of self-sown wild trees rambling away.
‘A hotel would block their view completely,’ Ryan says. ‘They’d have walls outside their windows. I can’t stand by and let that happen.’
‘So you … chained yourself to the tree?’ I nod towards the solid steel chain, still lying on the path where he discarded it, brambles on either side looking like they’ve been hacked away and are already making a resurgence.
‘For as long as the site’s occupied, they can’t swoop in and steal it.’
‘What about at night?’ I remember several incidents where Harrison has sent men in to secure protest sites when the protesters drop their guard and go home at night.
‘I’m here all day, every day. Sleeping here, eating here, I go home for showers when one of this lot will cover for me.’
‘Sounds uncomfortable.’ I try not to show my surprise. When Harrison said people were chained to trees, I didn’t think he meant actually living in the tree itself.
I look past him to where the sycamore tree sits on the cliff edge, so close to it that from here you’d imagine the roots to be coming out of the rocks themselves, but close up, it’s further from the edge than it looks, and surrounded by a sturdy barrier keeping everyone safe from going over.
‘We’re expecting someone to come and offer us blood money any time now,’ Ryan continues. ‘Those property developers have no morals. They think money solves everything, and they’ll do anything, no matter how morally corrupt, to get what they want without a second thought to the human cost involved.’
I gulp.
‘Like that tree could ever have a price.’ His face shows every emotion and none of them are good. ‘Three hundred years old, visible for miles across the sea, a guiding light that’s stood here since times so long ago that we can’t even imagine them. Not even Mr Barley, and he’s about the same age.’
From across the garden, the man who’s finished rearranging his gnomes and is now sitting on his kneeling pad sticks a finger up at Ryan with a grin.
I catch sight of his gnome arrangement and nearly do a double-take. The male gnome is painted to look like Boris Johnson and the female one is reaching across … Blimey, what is Theresa May’s hand doing down there? And why does Boris look like he’s enjoying it so much?
‘Aw,’ Tonya sighs. ‘He’s already done that one but with Margaret Thatcher and Ed Miliband. We need more inventive gnome sex positions! Gnome sex positions, anyone?’ She claps her hands to get the attention of the group. ‘Suggestions on my Facebook page to get people talking!’ She turns back to us. ‘Anyhoo, I must go and photograph them. My Twitter followers will be waiting for today’s update.’ Tonya rushes across to the gnomes, and I can feel Ryan’s eyes on me.
‘Welcome to the land of fabulous mad old people.’ He leans down to whisper in my ear, making me jump with his sudden closeness. ‘You’ll get used to it. Gnome sex positions are a regular topic of conversation around these parts.’
Gnomes or not, talking about sex positions with Ryan is a bit too much for me and there’s a genuine possibility I might be about to spontaneously combust.
‘And I’m not sure that was the best choice of words. These people spend far too much time thinking about gnome parts.’
Either I’m delirious or it’s the most hilarious thing ever, and I let out a guffaw so loud that every eye in the vicinity swivels towards me, including the sheep’s. A guffaw, for God’s sake. I don’t guffaw. I’ll be tittering and chortling next at this rate.
Ryan obviously takes pity on the guffawing fool and changes the subject.
‘Are your dad and sister okay?’
He’s still so nice. He was always the kindest, most caring guy. No matter what he had going on in his own life, he always checked to make sure my dad was okay after my mum died. Always kept boxes of Sullivan’s surplus fruit and veg to make sure he was eating well. Cheryl was still young when I knew him, and he’d always buy her toys and have more fun playing with them himself before he gave them to her. He was like an older brother, always looking out for us. I swallow back the lump in my throat. ‘They’re fine. Just well overdue a visit.’
‘Oh my God, Fee. There’s so much to talk about. I don’t know where to start.’ He runs a hand through his hair like he always used to – surprising that someone’s little habits don’t change over so many years, and surprising me by how natural the instinct is to reach out and grab his hand, like I always used to when he went to do it with compost-covered gardening gloves on.
My nails make crescent shapes in my palm as I force myself not to be so stupid. ‘So how are you? I didn’t think you’d still be—’
‘What’s this? What’s this?’ A lady with long champagne-blon
de hair rushes down from the care home waving a phone around. ‘I lost the last round, I can’t lose this one too!’
She stops to show the phone to Tonya and Mr Barley as she passes them, and then she spots me and Ryan. ‘Ooh, young people, you might know!’
No matter what she’s talking about, it’s quite nice to be considered a young person. Generally that term stops when you creak your way out of bed every morning and feel too decrepit to shop in Primark.
The long-haired woman is out of breath by the time she reaches us and pushes her phone in front of us. ‘What is it?’
On the screen is a photograph of some household object, but she whisks the phone out of sight as the two men abandon their board game and come over and Cynthia on the Zimmer frame hobbles this way, and Tonya pulls Mr Barley up from his seat and they all gather round.
The woman must notice my look of bewilderment because she holds out a hand and shakes mine. ‘I’m Alys. I play “Guess the Gadget” with my friend in the next county over. We send each other photos of household objects and score points for each one we get right, and she’s beating me by nine points at the moment. I’m not letting her outfox me on this one too!’
The phone is passed between all of them and they chatter about what the mystery object onscreen could be. Eventually someone’s holding it under my nose again, and Ryan steps closer to see the screen over my shoulder, and his closeness once again makes something inside me sputter to a halt. If I was made of electrics, a circuit board would’ve definitely just fried.
I’m hyperaware of his presence. His tall frame behind me, six-foot-one of solid muscle, so close that I can feel the brush of the dark hairs covering his tanned arm against mine. It takes all I have to remember how to breathe. Of all the ways I thought this day might go, trying to identify household gadgets with Ryan Sullivan standing so close I can feel his body heat certainly wasn’t one of them.
‘Isn’t it a cherry pitter?’ I say, trying to focus everything onto the phone screen in front of me and not the warm body behind me.
‘Oh, yes, I think you’re onto something there.’ Tonya nods her head of pink curls.
‘Yes! It can’t be anything else!’ Alys claps her hands together. ‘Fantastic! Thanks, Felicity!’
I go red even though the ability to identify a cherry pitter isn’t exactly something impressive.
‘As I said,’ Ryan whispers into my ear. ‘The land of fabulous mad old folks.’
It makes me laugh again, especially when he steps back and the distance allows me to take a much-needed breath. I hadn’t realised I was so perilously close to passing out from lack of oxygen.
‘How long’s it been since you two saw each other?’ Ffion peers at both of us.
‘Fifteen years,’ we say in perfect unison, and our eyes meet over the sea of old people between us.
‘I didn’t think you’d ever come back,’ he says without dropping my gaze, a smile tilting his lips. ‘You must have such a glamorous life. Didn’t think I’d ever see a high-flying career girl from the big city back in this little village. What are you doing now?’
‘I’m a—’ Oh God, I can’t tell him. I can’t tell any of them. The one thing they cannot know is where I work. They’ve made it quite clear what they think of companies like Landoperty Developments and how open they’d be to the idea of someone turning up and offering them a wodge of money in exchange for giving up the protest. They cannot know who I am or why I’m here.
Alys is texting her friend the answer to “Guess the Gadget”, but all the others are still surrounding us, and I’m squirming under their expectant gazes. They’re going to be suspicious if I don’t come up with something soon. It can’t feasibly take this long to remember what you supposedly do for a living and I look around desperately for inspiration.
One of the care home staff is making her way down from the building towards us, carrying a tray of cakes and cups of tea.
‘A chef!’ I say it so suddenly that I make myself jump, and two of the old folks glare at me in fright. One of the board game men takes his hearing aid out and gives it a whack.
A chef? What the heck am I thinking? Of all the fake careers I could possibly have chosen, why on earth did I say that one? I can’t cook for toffee. I definitely can’t cook toffee. Does toffee even need cooking? Why have I gone off on a toffee-related tangent when these people are standing around thinking I’m a chef? The most complicated thing I can cook is a Pop Tart. And that usually ends up burnt.
‘Oooh, where do you work?’ Tonya asks.
‘A restaurant. In London.’
She looks at me expectantly, like that’s plainly not enough info.
‘It’s called Riscaldar.’ I remember a property my boss sold last year. ‘I’m kind of an assistant, a kitchen manager, a waitress … I do a bit of everything.’
Why didn’t I think this through? I spent so long last night practising everything I was going to say, but it didn’t once cross my mind that they’d ask about my job.
Ryan quirks an eyebrow up. ‘A sous chef?’
What the heck is a sous chef? ‘Er, yeah, one of them.’
He lowers that eyebrow and raises the other one. ‘You? You didn’t used to be able to make a piece of toast without needing the fire brigade on hand.’
‘That was one time! And it wasn’t my fault that a passer-by saw smoke coming out the window and called 999! And the blame was half yours for distracting me!’
‘You’d set the timer knob for ten minutes. A block of ice would’ve charcoaled in that time.’
‘I’m not sure ice quite works like that when you heat it up.’
He grins. ‘Well, you’re the chef – you’d know.’
Tonya’s looking at her phone and making impressed noises. ‘Ooh, it says that rich and famous people eat there. Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever met?’
Oh God, did she have to google it? ‘Oh, I don’t really—’
‘Holy moly, those prices! It’s a good job they display them on the website or people would be having heart attacks all over the place when the bill came.’ She hands the phone around to show everyone. ‘It looks so fancy. Who knew a girl from Lemmon Cove had done so well?’
They give me a round of applause. They seriously give me a round of applause for working in a posh restaurant I’ve never even been to. All I did was sort out Harrison’s paperwork when he sold it.
It won’t be the disaster it seems to be, I tell myself. All I have to do is find this youngster and all this will be over. It’s not like I’m going to have any reason to prove my occupation. It’s a couple of days and then I’m out of here again, because I can already feel the need to put as much distance as possible between me and Ryan Sullivan.
‘Seriously, how’d you get into that?’ he asks.
‘I, um …’
‘No wonder you knew the cherry pitter.’ Alys finishes her text before I have a chance to think up a response to his question. ‘I’m going to come to you for all my “Guess the Gadget” needs.’
Oh no. I’m going to have to start studying up on household appliances. They’re going to expect me to know what everything is now. Let’s hope they don’t play “Guess the Gadget” too often.
‘Wow.’ Ryan runs his hand through his hair yet again. ‘Of all the things I imagined you doing now, that was absolutely the last one.’
Me too. Trust me on that. Although the thought that he’s imagined me doing anything is nice. I thought he’d have tried to erase every memory of me from his mind. ‘What about you?’
‘Nothing as interesting as cooking for the rich and famous. I do this and that. Odd jobs around the area. And I—’
‘There’s nothing Ryan can’t fix,’ Ffion interrupts. ‘He unblocked my loo last year and it’s been working like a charm ever since. Seaview Heights has got him on a retainer to fix all problems.’
‘Thanks, Ffion, I really wanted the person I haven’t seen for fifteen years to think of me up to my knees in the sew
age tank.’
‘Glad to be of service.’ Ffion salutes him as his sarcasm goes over her head, but I can’t help giggling.
‘The level of excitement in this village hasn’t changed then?’
‘What a day that one was. I’m not sure I’ve ever recovered.’
I can’t get my head around him still being here. It’s the opposite of what Ryan wanted to do with his life. Not that I can talk. Collecting Harrison’s dry-cleaning wasn’t exactly my greatest ambition either.
The nurse who came out sets the tray down on the flowerbed wall, and the elderly gang start hobbling across for cakes and cuppas, leaving me alone with Ryan.
‘And I own that over there,’ he carries on like this is not an unusual situation to be in. He lifts a muscular forearm and points across the hedge.
I follow his finger and push myself up on tiptoes because I must be missing something. All I can see is the campsite, fields and fields of static caravans, campervans, and tents, all spread out with little amenities buildings at the edge of each field.
He cannot mean the campsite.
I glance back at him. He doesn’t appear to be joking.
‘You’re the youngster?’ I say without thinking.
He looks confused.
I am terrible at this. ‘I overheard some village gossip,’ I say quickly. Village gossip is a believable excuse for anything in this village. ‘Said a youngster was running the protest and stirring up all the old ’uns.’
He laughs a gentle rumble of a laugh. ‘I’m only a youngster by comparison to that lot. And I assure you, it’s them stirring me up. This was all their idea. I’m just helping out because, well, the youngest of ’em is seventy-seven, they can’t be spending hours chained to a tree every day, and if we leave the site unoccupied, those underhanded property developers are going to prevent us getting back in.’
I try to ignore how sick that makes me feel, and pretend that I haven’t thought about him on every birthday that’s passed. I know he’s thirty-eight now, three and a bit years older than me, and definitely not a youngster. From Harrison’s description, I was expecting a teenager to swagger in wearing a black mask with a skull on it and a can of spray paint in one hand. He is nothing like the protest leader I was expecting, and nothing like the kind of person who’s going to give this up in exchange for the cash Harrison expects me to throw at him. And how can I now?
The Wishing Tree Beside the Shore: The perfect feel good romance to escape with this summer! Page 5
